The weak critique, while the worst are full of a passionate intensity.

I am going to begin a series of critiques of paintings by some of the readers of this blog. I will not be naming the individual artists and I need to apologize to some of them up front. When they have offered me multiple images I have chosen not with an eye for their best work, although some of it is very fine. I have instead sought out paintings that had problems. I will do this crit in a different manner than the last time. I intend to roll through lots of artworks by many different artists. I will stop midweek or so and photoshop one or two as you have seen me do in the past.
One of the reasons I am doing this is so that I can run more artists and their work across my gurney and beneath the scalpel of my opinion and experience.

If you see one of your paintings here in this post, it may well appear in another post later in the week. Nurse, pass me that retractor and lets get to work!

The fault I will be excising tonight is eye control. Or rather problems with eye control. Here are this landscapes' directional lines below.

This picture has a strong assembly of leading lines driving the viewer towards.....well, something behind the bush. This painting has really strong eye control, it grabs the viewer and propels them toward the right, but there is nothing to see there when they arrive. The moral of this story is that your leading lines, particularly if they are powerful like these, need to direct the viewer to a subject or center of interest. You might begin by asking yourself "whats the name of this picture", that's your subject or center of interest, then use your lines for eye control to take the viewer there.

Here's another leading line problem. Now this artist has led the viewer effectively to the subject matter, but there's a way in which this painting could be easily improved. Watch what happens when I flip it.

See how much more comfortable that is. We have a bias in reading paintings,we read them from left to right. That is possibly because we read text that way, but I think it may be wired even deeper than that. In any event the painting is far more effective running from left to right rather than the other way around. The upper version takes you in, gives you the subject and then leaves you hanging wondering about all that empty mountain area, which is where the eye then wants to travel. In the lower version the line of the top of the mountain actually brings the viewer to the little house.

This artist offered me a lot of fine images, but I chose this one because it had a problem. It is another eye control problem. Our attention is seized by the stream in the foreground which grabs us and leads us ...........into the frame on the right hand side of the painting. When you crash someone into the frame like this, they stagger away dazed, and never get to the rest of the painting.


Here's a Monsted a 19th century artist courtesy of our friends and helpers at the art renewal center.org, the worlds largest online museum. Look what he does with the river. Your eye follows it deep into the painting. That leading line of the river bank takes us back to the tree. This is essentially the same project as above, handled in a more effective way.

There is some really nice color in this one and the little grouping of trees up at 12 o'clock is very fetching, but it has an eye control problem too. By now you know what I am going to say, don't you. You will always be aware of this fault in a painting from here on out, I think.


There it is. The painting has a strong grouping of leading lines insistently taking us ........behind the bush again! The most effective design for this piece would take the viewer up to that great little copse of trees at the top of the painting.
When you scope out a landscape, ask yourself, "where are the lines leading the eye? do I need to bend those lines to make my painting more effective? or maybe I should set up over there". Often by moving back and forth in front of your subject you can find a location where the lines in nature lead your viewer where you want them to go. But just as often, they don't and you have to make your own lines that will.

This painting has a different sort of eye control problem, called "one for each eye". We don't know which one to look at. they both want our attention. A more effective composition would probably include three objects and lead the viewer on a path through them.

Always be thinking about of eye control, you want to plan how your viewers gaze will travel through your painting. You might take digital photos sometime of a number of your paintings and then print them out. Next draw the eyes' path through them using a black marker.

I will return tomorrow and continue the dissection.

Seagos materials updated

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com
Edward Seago The Urn from Edward Seago by Ron Ranson ( available on Amazon )

Here's another Seago. If you click on it, you should be able to see the rough prepared texture of the ground. Even in areas that are just stained with color like most of the left hand side of the painting, there is already thick impasto. This little trick allows for a lot of nice handling.

Lets say you wanted to do some paintings using Seagos methods, how would you go about that? Here's what I would suggest.

A whole lot of the colors Seago used are archaic, impermanent or unavailable so some substitutions need to be made. This is not really such a big deal as it is the artists mental processes that determine what his work looks like more than his pigments . If you had handed him the palette I am about to suggest I guarantee you he could have made a Seago.

• Yellow ocher most of our yellow ochers today are actually lab made or whats called mars colors. That's not a problem. I think they are better, however if you want a real yellow ocher Sennelier makes one. You probably won't like it, compared to the ocher we are accustomed to today, it will seem dirty. I got a tube once and I was surprised by the difference.
• Alizirin Crimson is still available today but it is impermanent and has been replaced by quinacridone or "permanent alizirin" a much better product. If you haven't moved to the permanent alizirin I recommend you do.
• Ultramarine, French type preferably
• Blue black is available from several manufacturers, no one makes a real indigo today so far as I know. The real thing is impermanent . However Winsor and Newton, Williamsburg and others make an approximation that works just fine.
• Chrome Yellow was a lead based color and is now extinct. It was impermanent and has been replaced by cadmium yellow. Permanent yellow would work here also.
• Viridian is of course still manufactured and is expensive, but easy to find. RGH makes a very affordable one.
• Indian red is a common earth color available from most color makers.This has a surprising amount of pigmenting strength.
• Vermilion, I have written before about this color. I used it a lot when I was young but it is deadly poisonous and is no longer widely available. It is mercuric sulfide, lead is one thing, mercury is a whole nother animal, don't use it. Many manufacturers make a vermilion hue that is based on cadmium and they are pretty good. People still argue if they are as good, but they will certainly do.
• Burnt Sienna, Winsor Newton makes a nice one.
• Flake white. Use titanium, I guess, don't get me started. Old paintings have a lovely sort of look because of flake that is unobtainable in no other way. Soon we will be unable to buy flake anyway, and the difference will be academic.

Seago bought all of his colors from Winsor and Newton. The other thing besides his choice of colours that greatly influenced how his paintings looked, was that peculiar ground. Here's how he made it. He heated real rabbitskin glue based gesso and when it was hot he stirred in White lead from a can.Then he laid that onto panels with a stiff brush. The thick priming material preserved the visible brushstrokes. Its hard to believe you can mix water based gesso and oil paint, but you can, and I have done it. Besides having a textured surface it also has a weird absorbent quality that makes the paint set up REAL fast.

I have also stirred oil paint into acrylic gesso and used that. I have no idea if that is archivally sound, but it works and lasts at least several years unchanged. I do not recommend you do this. If you do and its a problem don't come whining to me, because I warned you.

The most reasonable and probably the soundest way to arrive at that sort of a textured ground is to choose a thicker brand of titanium white (Utrecht in a plastic tub for instance ) and add a small amount of alkyd to it so it will dry in your own lifetime, and lay it down thickly onto your panel with a bristle brush You will have to do a few to get the hang of it . White lead works best for this too, but I think we had all better learn to do without it.

This incidentally MUST be done on a panel, the flexing of a canvas under this thick priming is sure to crack. So never on canvas, OK?

Tomorrow the great critique project begins.

A short bio of Eward Seago

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com


Edward Seago from Edward Seago the landscape art by James W. Reid Sothebys pub. 1991

I will do another post or two on Seago and then Monday I will change gears and begin some critiques of readers art. You still have a day or two, so send me images of your paintings. I already have more than I can do so it will be a sort of sweepstakes. I will sit on some of them and do another crit in a month or so. This will be a regular feature of this blog until I drive it in to the ditch.

I want to give you a brief history on Seago. He was born into a comfortably well off family in the East Anglia region of England in 1910. East Anglia is a low country of fens and moors. Although he traveled the world painting, it was East Anglia that most inspired him and he returned to its low and windswept moors and estuary's throughout his whole life for subject matter.
As a child he developed some kind of a heart problem that made him nearly an invalid. Seago was kept home from school and was not allowed any rough play or athletics, he instead spent his time drawing. No one really ever knew what the problem was with Seagos heart and it may well have been psychosomatic.

At 17 he was befriended by a neighbor lady of the highest social caste and introduced to the world of the noble and wealthy. All of his life these connections provided him with clients and sponsors. He spent the first part of his career doing portraits of the wealthy and their horses. Seago traveled with the circus and, and illustrated several books on those experiences.
During world war two he was able to fool a medical inspector and enter the army and became a major in the camouflage service. Again he came to the attention of the top brass and became a companion of the highest generals. When his lifelong heart problems recurred he was brought before a medical board and dismissed. Rather than send him home the generals he had befriended, and some of whom were amateur painters themselves, gave him a jeep and a driver so he could document the war with his art.

After the war these drawings were shown in conjunction with their publication in a book. Over the following years he became a favorite of the royal family allowing him grand patronage and putting the ultimate seal of approval on his art in the eyes of the buying public. People lined up before the opening of his shows for a chance to buy his art.

He was however either ignored or sometimes savaged by the critics in the newspapers. He was also never admitted to the Royal Academy. His several gay lovers in his youth had both died tragically, his relationship with his overbearing parents was stormy and he never had anything but the deepest doubt in his own worth as an artist. All of this added up to make him a deeply unhappy and haunted man.
The last years of his life were spent with a young man, Peter Seymour who was a lover and personal secretary to him until his death from a brain tumor in 1974. Together they traveled the world and made a beautiful home together they called Dutch house in his beloved East Anglia. He could paint his back garden, as the English call their yards and at the bottom of that was moored his sailboat . He could and did, sail from his back door to Paris.

His fame has continued to grow since his death and the prices of his paintings has risen continually as well. There are a LOT of them. He was extremely prolific and he painted at lightning speed rarely spending more than a few hours on a picture.
Seago used an unusual palette mostly of duller or earth colors. Here it is:

• yellow ocher
• alizarin crimson
• ultramarine
• blue black or indigo
• chrome yellow
• viridian
• Indian red or light red
• vermilion
• sometimes burnt sienna
• flake white

Seago usually worked on canvas and on panels that he himself applied a thick brush stroke texture to in lieu of a more conventional priming. This texture had a profound effect on how his paintings were made. Tomorrow I will tell you how to do it.

Street painting

Edward Seago "Sunlight and Shadow Pin Mill" © The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com
Image from an exhibition catalogue, Edward Seago by Richard Green gallery, London 1994


I painted yesterday and today in the Boston Public Garden, that's next to the commons. Its Bostons version of Central Park. It was awfully nice being out in the warm spring sun. I got in touch with my inner lizard.
Over the course of the day I talked to about 900 people as I tried frantically to paint a group of flowering trees in front of some of Bostons grand 19th century architecture. The leaves were unfurling as I painted. Every time I looked up it was different. I don't know if the picture is going to work or not. It will certainly need to reprocessed in the studio.

All day long people talked to me and I enjoy that. I have done so much street painting that I am totally comfortable with onlookers. I also have heard all the things they usually say. From the most perceptive like, "Where do you show your art?" to the dumbest " Are you painting this here?"

I hear a lot about peoples own attempts at painting. A woman came up to me today and told me she had been drawing some but tried to paint and it hadn't gone very well. I told her there was no reason to think she couldn't learn it. Painting is no more difficult than ophthalmic surgery or classical violin! I warbled encouragingly.

She can't even conceive of how hard I have worked to be able to do this. Often they say "what a gift" as if I just got out of bed one day and could do it. I know when they say the gift thing, they mean well and that they mean to indicate they think it special and out of the ordinary.

I have noticed a funny sort of phenomenon with painting, at least for me:

It won't stay learned.

Now my father was an eye doctor. Every morning when he got out of bed he knew how to be an eye doctor. He had it down. He didn't go to work some days to discover he hadn't a clue what the hell he was doing. But I do. Some days I wake up and I have no idea how to make a painting. I can make a really fine painting one week and the next I can't. I have many times become aware of a repeated mistake or problem I am having. I work hard to overcome it, and do. Then about a year later there it is again in a painting and I have to beat it back once more.

Sometimes a painter will say to me that they are self conscious about painting where there are crowds of people, because their painting might not come out very well. People generally don't know the difference.I have seen them Ga-ga over a painting that had gone terribly wrong and I have seen them walk by my best work without a glance. Their opinion means nothing. Painting is so far from most peoples daily experience,and they didn't learn about it in school
So I work at being patient with them, and try to remember that I am an ambassador for the painting world when I am meeting people out there.

The newspapers and magazines either ignore painting or only publicize the oddest modern art they can find. The newspapers like a good entertaining story better than the art itself. Usually their writers know nothing about art they just have a job to do and that is to cover paper with print. A photograph of an artist painting outside is a good way to do that.

For many years I had a gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts. One week several people came in to ask me "was that you in the Los Angeles Times?" I would say, no, I don't think so. Then someone brought the LA Times in and showed it to me. I had no idea the newspaper photographer had taken my picture. Rockport was an art colony and tourist town, my picture was often taken hundreds of times a day. But there I was, in the travel and leisure section, full color, front page and above the fold, as they say in the newspaper biz.

It was a nice big picture. There I was working away on a promontory overlooking the historic harbor with the sailboats and the yacht club and all the people and seagulls and lobstermen, all milling around below me. On my big Gloucester easel I have a painting about 30 by 30. I had been working on it for a week and the painting is singing, its as good as I get. You could see the picture and you could see what I was painting beside it. It was a very professional piece of work that won me prizes, and I sold about a zillion prints of it. I kept the painting rather than selling it, so my daughters would have a good one when the death bunny comes hop, hop, hoppin along. Yep, there I was and there was the painting and that fabulous view that had been painted by Aldro Hibbard and Emile Gruppe and Carl Peters and Reynolds Beal.

The caption below the photo read "A local artist tries his hand at oil painting"